Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  If Lincolnshire can be taken as more than a one-off case, as does seem likely, then Great Army contingents seem to have kept something of their social shape upon becoming landed, since settlements were organized by the leaderships for those who had already amassed enough booty to satisfy their aspirations and pick up a small landed estate pretty much like the normans. Those who hadn’t, presumably, took their booty and went looking for a new leader to follow. The landed estates used in the settlement had all been confiscated from Anglo-Saxon owners. Some were taken from secular landowners who had been killed or exiled – although there does not seem to have been a complete extinction of the old Anglo-Saxon landowning class in Danelaw – but there is good evidence too that many estates were taken from Church institutions, which by the ninth century may have owned up to one-quarter of England’s landed resources.43

  If Lincolnshire can be taken as a particular example of the general rule, then the following model could be suggested for Danelaw and northern Francia. The basic migration unit was the individual Great Army contingent of up to a thousand men, or just a bit more in the case of kings, less in the case of jarls – not the army as a whole – whose leaders organized the allocation of lands to those who were ready to settle. Some of the relevant issues – who would qualify for any land, and on what scale – were presumably discussed in the original negotiations which brought the Great Armies into being. These settlements took a form analogous to the kind of partial elite replacement we have encountered in some of the fifth-century Germanic settlements in former Roman provinces in Europe, except that the sokemen with their -bys and -thorps may have represented the insertion of a smallholding elite at a lower social scale than anything suggested by the settlements on Roman soil. The main reasons for thinking so are the smallish size of their holdings recorded in Doomsday Book, where their descendants survived until 1066, and the fact that they generated a bigger cultural change on the linguistic and other fronts than anything analogous in the post-Roman west.

  Certainly in northern Danelaw, at least, Norse became the prevalent language, whereas Germanic languages never replaced Latin and its dialects except in Anglo-Saxon England, where the elite replacement had been more or less complete. When it comes to explaining the linguistic change and all the Scandinavian place names, some have supposed it necessary to envisage that the settlement of Great Army contingents was followed by further – undocumented – settlements of Scandinavian peasants. This seems unnecessary. Given that certainly ten thousand Vikings – and potentially considerably more than that – had to be accommodated in the distribution process, this was enough to generate a Norse-dominated landowning class at a sufficiently local level to explain the cultural changes. In comparison, the Norman Conquest involved accommodating only around five thousand new landowners, and that over the whole – not just part – of England, so there is no doubt that the new dominant Norse class lived much more cheek by jowl with their Anglo-Saxon peasant labourers than the Normans who were to follow.

  Great Army contingents were responsible, however, for only one part of Norse migration into the west. In Ireland, settlement took a different form. There Scandinavians never managed – perhaps never tried – to destroy the coherence of whole kingdoms and make possible the large-scale redistribution to themselves of landed assets. Instead, we see only niche settlements, limited to a few coastal towns: Dublin above all. These were quite large, and economically powerful. After its re-establishment, rival tenth-century Irish kings competed with one another to exercise hegemony over Dublin’s valuable mercenary and monetary assets. Nonetheless, although the migration unit must again have taken the form of organized warbands, permanent Norse settlement in Ireland can only have amounted to a few thousand individuals at most.44

  In the northern and western isles and north and western Scotland, the mode of settlement was much more like Danelaw, in the sense that an intrusive Scandinavian population took control of much of the areas’ landed assets. We have no documentation here of the numbers involved, nor any narrative of the settlement, but its effects show up in the place-name evidence. In the northern isles – Shetland and Orkney – no pre-Scandinavian place names survive at all. Every older stratum of name-giving has been eclipsed by the cultural effects of Viking-era settlement. In the western isles and affected areas of the Scottish mainland the wipe-out was not so complete, but again there is a dense spread of Scandinavian names. What scale of ninth-century settlement is required to explain this remarkable outcome?

  When the place-name evidence was first assessed, the researchers thought that the complete disappearance of any older name-giving stratum had to mean that the indigenous, probably Celtic-speaking, populations of the area had been completely eradicated – early medieval ethnic cleansing. More recent approaches to place names have emphasized, however, that the modern spread of Norse names reflects all the intervening centuries of Norse-speaking domination of the area, not one apocalyptic moment of takeover. Norse settlement was clearly substantial, and the place-name effect could not have been achieved by much less than a complete takeover of land ownership by dominant Norse, who must have intruded themselves into local society on a level of intensity at least similar to that achieved by the sokemen of Danelaw. This would not require ethnic cleansing, though, and some of the recent archaeological evidence has confirmed the point. Even where distinctively Norse house-types replaced earlier Pictish forms, such as at Buckquoy, detailed excavations have shown that many small items of indigenous manufacture continued in use, suggesting that the old populations were living alongside, if subordinate to, the Norse settlers.45

  In the western isles and Scottish mainland, some continuity of the indigenous population was always supposed, since the place names betray more mixed cultural origins. More than that, the Irish annals record, in a series of entries from the 850s, the activities of Gallgoidil: ‘Scandinavianized Irish’. These mystery men have been much discussed, but they seem later to have given their name to Galloway and the consensus view places them in the Hebrides, as Celts who quickly reached an accommodation with incoming Norse settlers.46 DNA patterns among the modern populations of these areas confirm the point. Forty per cent of the modern population of Shetland possess DNA types which show them to have been descended from Norse ancestors. In Orkney, the percentage is 35 per cent, and in Scotland and the western isles about 10.47 It is dangerous, as we have seen in the case of the Anglo-Saxons, to read modern DNA patterns as fossils from the moment of settlement. There have been too many events in between that might have caused one strand of DNA to spread preferentially. Nonetheless, this evidence does show that while there was a substantial Norse migration flow into these areas, it did not involve the total ethnic cleansing once supposed. A more precise indication of the kind of migration unit operating in these contexts is also provided by evidence from the final area of western Norse settlement: the North Atlantic.

  Scandinavian colonization of the Faroes is completely undocumented, but since that of Iceland began in the 870s, and the Faroes are en route, then presumably it was under way by the mid-ninth century at the latest. For Iceland, there is much more information. There, from the early twelfth century and in complete contrast to Viking communities established anywhere else, its Norse colonists began to write down their own history, primarily, it seems, to document claims to landownership. Around the year 1100, the Icelandic Norse traced the settlement of their island back to four hundred main colonists, each of whom established one of the large farming establishments which at that point dominated the island. These four hundred establishments were the centres of larger, interconnected networks of agricultural activity, not single farms, and it has been estimated that there were more like four thousand actual farmsteads of varying sizes in existence at this date. Each farmstead supported a family and some dependants, so that we get a figure in the low tens of thousands for the population of Iceland in c.1100. The Icelandic literature also preserves some sense of the kind of migration units by wh
ich the settlement had been made. The costs involved in getting from Scandinavia (or indeed from the British Isles, the intermediate point from which many of the settlers came) to Iceland were prohibitive. The major colonists all seem to have been wealthy men, able to fit out or hire the necessary ships to transport the people and equipment that would be required for a successful farmstead. Poorer men could either not take part at all, or had to attach themselves to the train of one of these grandees. As such observations suggest, we are certainly talking here of extended flows of migration rather than the more distinct moments of settlement that occurred in England and Francia when a Great Army contingent settled down on the land. No numbers are preserved for the aristocrat-led fleets that made their way to Iceland, but one such fleet in the later push on to Greenland consisted of twenty-five ships, thirteen of which in the end failed to make the crossing.48

  In Iceland, of course, there was no indigenous population to subdue, so the settlers could safely come in dribs and drabs, rather than in the much larger Great Army contingents required to create political Lebensraum in Anglo-Saxon England. This was probably also true of the northern and western isles. There, as we have seen, indigenous landholders were certainly subordinated, but any pre-Viking political structures in these areas seem to have been on such a local, small-scale level that large Norse forces were not required to win major battles. It may well have been possible, therefore, for an individual or small groups of aristocrats and their retainers to bite off a piece of territory. Again, in the absence of direct narrative evidence, there remains a strong element of supposition about this, but it is the case that a larger political structure – the Earldom of Orkney – emerged among the Norse of the northern and western isles only at the end of the ninth century, long after the initial settlement process was complete. The emergence of this earldom was enough to make some of these Norse push on to Iceland where they could re-establish their independence. Both points lend further weight to the argument that the subsequent migration flow onwards to Iceland and Greenland was similar to the one that had created the original Norse domination of the western and northern isles in the earlier ninth century.

  Despite many gaps in the evidence, then, it is possible to come to some conclusions about Scandinavian migration flows towards the west in the ninth and the early tenth century. Two very distinct types of unit are evident, each appropriate to its context. Where large indigenous political entities had to be subdued for settlement to proceed, then the typical unit was the major warband, operating with up to a thousand warriors or just a few more. These warbands were also capable of banding together to take on really big targets such as Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Elsewhere, where there was no indigenous opposition or where it was organized only in small sociopolitical units, much smaller aristocrat-led migration units could achieve adequate domination. All told, the total numbers involved in the different migration flows were substantial. Well over ten thousand Norse warriors, and perhaps double that, were accommodated in the settlements carved out by Great Army activity in England and on the continent. A few thousand more settled in Ireland, and probably rather more in the northern branch of the Scandinavian diaspora which spread over north Britain and the Atlantic islands.

  But there is one other important issue we haven’t yet addressed. How many of these armed males brought dependent women and children with them from Scandinavia? If an adult male’s dependants are to be reckoned at between four and five, the usual convention, the presence or not of dependants could increase your estimate of the total migration flow from a few tens of thousand of people to over a hundred thousand. For the Great Armies we have little information, but, perhaps surprisingly, there is some. Part of the second Great Army to attack England in the 890s left its women and children in Danelaw for safe-keeping while it launched its attacks. What percentage of the army had such dependants is unclear, and also where these dependants originated. Had they come from Scandinavia, or were they picked up en route?

  Some information on the latter point has emerged from recent work on the DNA of modern Iceland. Iceland has not seen a huge amount of either immigration or emigration since the Viking Age, so that there is a better than usual chance that modern DNA patterns will reflect those of the original colonists. This work has looked at both Y chromosome patterns transmitted only through the male line, and mitochondrial DNA transmitted only through the female. A fascinating contrast has emerged. Amongst the male population, 75 per cent possess Y chromosomes whose particularities can be traced back to Scandinavia, and only 25 per cent those suggestive of an origin in the British Isles. The mitochondrial evidence, however, is very different. Thirty-six per cent of the modern Icelandic population descends from Norse womenfolk, whereas 62 per cent possess DNA suggestive of female ancestors from the British Isles. Substantial numbers of female colonists, maybe something like one-third, had come all the way from Scandinavia, therefore, but maybe two-thirds were women picked up by Viking males on their travels.

  Similar results have been obtained from the Faroes. In Viking Scotland and the northern and western isles, however, the pattern is different again. In these regions, there is no substantial dichotomy between the percentages of Norse male and female DNA among the modern population, suggesting perhaps that, in these zones of earliest Norse colonization, the basic migration unit was familial, with similar numbers of male and female colonists coming from Scandinavia. By the time colonization moved on to the Faroes and Iceland, however, Viking males increasingly obtained women from the British Isles. What the proportion of indigenous to Scandinavian females was among the womenfolk of the Great Army warriors we cannot tell, but the DNA evidence from further north would indicate that there were certainly some of the former present. We clearly shouldn’t be multiplying our estimates for Scandinavian males by four or five, therefore, to take account of accompanying dependants, but maybe by two or three.49

  Viking migration into eastern Europe took substantially different forms. The Norse diaspora into Russia shows no sign at all of conquering armies creating the political Lebensraum for subsequent settlement, and little of minor aristocratic farmers setting up independent farmsteads. As it shows up in the archaeology, there were two main phases of Norse intrusion. For the first – the later eighth and the early ninth century – substantial traces have been uncovered at only two sites: the oldest levels of Staraia Ladoga and the fortified site of Sarskoe Gorodishche on the Upper Volga. Only half a hectare of Staraia Ladoga has been excavated, however, so we have no real understanding of its size at this early date, and no estimate at all of the Scandinavian population of Sarskoe Gorodishche. This does not amount to much, and it would be tempting to think that only a very few Scandinavian traders had started to explore the river routes of European Russia at this time, were it not for the fact that the existence of a Norse-dominated Khaganate in northern Russia is reported as early as 839.50 This could not have come into existence without either substantial numbers of Norse immigrants, or a considerable degree of organization. There may well be more archaeological evidence of eighth- and early ninth-century Scandinavian immigration waiting to be found.

  As was also the case in the west, the flow of migrants picked up considerably in the second half of the ninth and the early tenth century. At this point, Scandinavian migration was clustering in three distinct zones (Map 20). The first ran along the River Volkhov between Lakes Ladoga and Ilmen. At the northern end, Staraia Ladoga was rebuilt and grew to its maximum size of ten hectares. Further south lay Gorodishche (the Holmgard of Norse sagas), as we have seen, the main power centre of the region – a fortified site surrounded by stone walls three metres high and three metres thick. Its third known major Scandinavian centre was Izborsk-Pskov. The cemeteries of all three centres have thrown up enough Norse material to suggest that they had real functioning Scandinavian communities of men and women, who had imported much of their way of life with them. The countryside round about – the Priladozhie – has also produced enough stray finds
of Scandinavian materials to suggest that this region may have seen some Norse farmers and well as traders.51

  A second clustered Scandinavian presence is known from sites along the Upper Volga. There, nineteenth-century excavations produced Norse materials from Yaroslavl, Pereslavl and Suzdal-Vladimir. The methods employed were too haphazard to be able to say anything very precise. More recent and more careful work at a number of other sites in the region, however, has confirmed a substantial Scandinavian influx. A late ninth- to early tenth-century settlement at Timerevo, for instance, eventually spread over ten hectares. Excavations there have uncovered over fifty dwellings and a cemetery. This site was eventually occupied by Finns and Slavs as well as Scandinavians, but the Norse were there first. A substantial Scandinavian presence has also been established at Petrovskoe, where there were two settlements, and at Mikhailovskoe, where a cemetery containing four hundred burials (63 per cent of them cremations) has been excavated. Most of the Scandinavian materials here date to the tenth century.